As subject: GNU netcat 0.7.1 from buildroot installs to the target filesystem as /usr/bin/avr32-linux-netcat, as if it were a cross-compilation tool. The symlink from /usr/bin/nc goes correctly to netcat, but /usr/bin/netcat is wrongly named. Apologies that I can't figure out why this is happening, it must be something simple but is beyond my cross-compiling autotools knowledge.
Reassigning to buildroot project
Thanks Denys for forwarding the bug. Thanks Nick for the report. The bug has been fixed in my for-2010.08, that will be pushed to Peter before the 2010.08 release. See http://git.buildroot.net/~tpetazzoni/git/buildroot/commit/?h=for-2010.08.